I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.